Billy Graham Center
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Collection 489, T1
From Collection 490.

MacDONALD: I had been called to be pastor of First Baptist Church in Mill Valley (California) in 1960. This...actually, one of our...my predeces...my only predecessor in that church (it was a young church), Bert Jones (class of '38), I think.... Bert, he's a good friend. And he was there for thirteen years and I followed him for almost the same length of time. And it was a church here in a classy suburb of San Francisco. You really need to understand the character of the community. Actually, it...it's on one hand an arty community that draws some of these people but it also has a lot of...of people of San Francisco executive types and beautiful homes and so forth, and was right close to some of the other very high toned residential communities outside...in Marin Country there. So our people were conscious of being in this milieu. They also wanted their pastor to be a preacher of the gospel. And I was, and I think they were fully satisfied with that. But the thing that was not satisfying to me was that the church itself was not a...was not aggressive in its faith. They wanted me to me but there wasn't much there. And I certainly don't blame it on my predecessor. I just think it's the way the church came to be. And I was discontented with it. By the way, I...you folks have this book [The House of Acts, 1970]. ....I wrote this book about our ministry there. And I said here that one of the things that set me up on this was I prayed that God would do something to shake this church up. We're just ten miles outside of San Francisco. And first thing I knew, as I reflected on it later, a young woman showed up in our church and her mother came with her one time, was deeply concerned about her and asked me to do what I could to help her and her husband. She didn't give me details but I went and called on this young woman and eventually the truth came out: they had been involved with drugs for many years, mostly LSD but also heroin. And so I've told their story here [in his book]. When her husband came to our church, he responded to the invitation immediately and his story was just incredible. But what had happened, he'd...just the night before they'd been out on a toot and he'd been loaded up with LSD but he knew that God was working on him. And I've related all of this story in here. Well that was what began our ministry. I discipled him. I baptized him. And she was a member of one of our Baptist churches in the area and so I took them in and their family. And he became a very spontaneous witness to others of his friends in the scene, and would ask us...he'd come to prayer meeting and ask us to pray for specific people and we did this. Well, after a while they started to come. And then one day he really got a hold of me (and he was a guy who tended to be very critical of our, what? conservative approach, you know, to evangelism and so on. And he laid this burden on me that I wasn't really doing anything to show that I cared about his hippy friends. I went into Haight Ashbury with him. We sat down, as I recall. We looked all around, went through their stuff, and sat down on a curb in Haight Ashbury and we talked about "What could we do?" And so I promised him that I would get some of my friends together and we'd work. Well, I called John Streeter, who was two years ahead of me and was at First Baptist in San Francisco. Ed Plowman, who was at Park Presideo in San Francisco (I think he was about the class of '52, something like that. Do you know Ed Plowman?

INTERVIEWER: I know the name.

MacDONALD: Well, you know, he's been the editor of NIRR [National International Religion Report], and was with Christianity Today and so on. We were very close. Those two guys and two or three others, we formed a corporation called Evangelical Concerns. And we had nothing to start with except monies that began to come it for it. But we managed to get it going. And with the early people that we had, we opened up a storefront in San Francisco in Haight Ashbury called the Living Room. Later on those guys decided to open up a house that we called the House of Acts, a few miles north of us in Marin County. And so it was a communal thing. And we had a lot of ups and downs with them. It was very tough. It was exciting and rewarding but difficult. They were highly critical of just about everything that was standard for us. One of our favorite illustrations is that they put a lot of pressure on me to get rid of the pews. Now we had a nice church, very nice. "Get those pews out of here and put in pillows and let's just all sit around on the floor and be a lot more casual about this." You know, I had refined people, older people in the church and so forth. I just had to say, "You...you really have got to be kidding. I'm still responsible to minister to those people as well as to you." What I wanted to do was to bring them together in some kind of [laughs] agreeable center rather than one extreme or the other.